In praise of the holiday tome

Thursday 24 August 2006 07.22 EDT
First published on Thursday 24 August 2006 07.22 EDT

Poor old Cherie - she can't even settle down to a good book on holiday without some pesky paparazzo stealing a snap. Looking rather large, came back the intelligence, though for once the object under sneering newspaper scrutiny wasn't the first lady herself, but her literary companion on the catamaran cruising off Barbados - an 890-page stonker on Europe's history since the second world war.

Now, we all know that analysing the holiday reading of leading political figures has become as much a part of the summer sporting season as cricket on the village green. Already we've had David Cameron with Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and Bush with Albert Camus's L'Etranger. So what does this particular book say about Cherie Blair? That she's a killjoy, an intellectual wannabe, or the sort of sun-seeker who likes big books because they make better sombreros?

Postwar is the magnum opus of Tony Judt, a professor in European studies at New York University, and was published late last year to great acclaim. Judt is a critic of the Iraq war and a formidable opponent of US parochialism. His contempt was nowhere more apparent than in a recent attack on a fellow historian John Lewis Gaddis, whom he accused of "provincialism" and unapologetic triumphalism in a review of Gaddis's book about the cold war. The spat was noted on this side of the Atlantic because both were longlisted for the Samuel Johnson award.

So what better book could the prime minister's consort take with her on her hols to arm her for those long, hot Caribbean nights arguing with hubby about foreign policy? And when else could Cherie - a working mother as well as a political spouse - be expected to find the time and space to read such a huge work?

Despite what the papers might suggest, for most readers, the pleasures of holiday reading do not lie simply in abandoning oneself to solitary escapist fantasy, but in doing something beyond the limits of everyday life. It is a time to allow oneself to be stimulated and provoked - to have all those discussions and those thoughts that one is usually too tired or too harassed to pursue.

It is surely simply untrue that all readers want to fill their holidays with slender volumes of trashy fiction. It was, after all, the summer holiday of 1999 that transformed Antony Beevor from a respectable military historian to a best-selling author. Suddenly, dog-eared copies of Stalingrad could be spotted on beaches all over Europe. And a quick call to the departure lounge outlet of Borders bookshop at Stansted airport would seem to support this heresy. Among the top 50 sellers to tourists awaiting that delayed charter flight to Spain or Greece in the three months to August are Laurence Rees's Auschwitz: The Nazis & The Final Solution, while the store's biggest non-fiction seller for the year so far is Jung Chang and John Halliday's biography of Mao, which, like Judt, checks in at well over 800 pages. It will also take up a sizeable proportion of your hand luggage.